Creative content—such as music, imagery, video, film, and the like—is increasingly converted into an electronic form or stored in such a form. Often, such content is originally recorded (i.e., created) in an electronic form. More particularly, this electronic form is typically digital.
“Digital goods” is a generic label for electronically stored or transmitted content, such as creative content. Examples of digital goods include images, audio clips, video, multimedia, software, and data. Digital goods may also be called a “digital signal,” “content signal,” “digital bitstream,” “media signal,” “digital object,” “object,” and the like.
Digital goods are often distributed to consumers over private and public networks—such as Intranets and the Internet. In addition, these goods are distributed to consumers via fixed computer readable media, such as a compact disc (CD-ROM), digital versatile disc (DVD), soft magnetic diskette, or hard magnetic disk (e.g., a preloaded hard drive).
Digital goods offer many advantages over conventional analog media in terms of quality and ease of transmission. With the ever-increasing popularity of the Internet, digital goods have become a mainstay ingredient of the Web experience.
Unfortunately, it is relatively easy for a person to pirate the pristine digital content of a digital good at the expense and harm of the content owners—which includes the content author, publisher, developer, distributor, etc. The content-based industries (e.g., entertainment, music, film, etc.) that produce and distribute content are plagued by lost revenues due to digital piracy.
Modern digital pirates effectively rob content owners of their lawful compensation. Unless technology provides a mechanism to protect the rights of content owners, the creative community and culture will be impoverished.
In addition, digital goods are often stored in databases. As these databases grow, the needs for categorizing goods are becoming increasingly important. The next generation of database management software will need to accommodate solutions for fast and efficient categorization of digital goods and protection of copyrights in those digital goods.